Tag: Main Stream Media

“Having been stabbed with a knife and spent a month in the hospital during my service time I can tell you knives can and do kill people all the time.”

With all of the talk and media coverage of the recent shooting in Virginia on how a lunatic lefty targeted Republican Congress members, this may have gone unnoticed but for the fact that I try to read any press, positive or negative, about the profession I have worked in all of my life.

I recently caught a headline on my Twitter feed (@downrangewithcw) that jumped out at me. “Pregnant Mother Shot Dead by Cops Whom She Called for Help.” If I was an average citizen who saw that and took it as truthful news, I would be outraged. How dare the cops gun down a pregnant female who called them for help without any justification? My anger and outrage would be justified, if that was the “whole story.”

The NBC writer needs to check out the law before making themselves look foolish. As a 35+ year cop, and firearms instructor for LEO’s the “Justifiable Use of Force Laws” are actually fairly easy to understand IF YOU READ THEM. Here is the law that covers this incident;
776.013 Home protection; use or threatened use of deadly force; presumption of fear of death or great bodily harm.—
(1) A person is presumed to have held a reasonable fear of imminent peril of death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another when using or threatening to use defensive force that is intended or likely to cause death or great bodily harm to another if:
(a) The person against whom the defensive force was used or threatened was in the process of unlawfully and forcefully entering, or had unlawfully and forcibly entered, a dwelling, residence, or occupied vehicle, or if that person had removed or was attempting to remove another against that person’s will from the dwelling, residence, or occupied vehicle; and
(b) The person who uses or threatens to use defensive force knew or had reason to believe that an unlawful and forcible entry or unlawful and forcible act was occurring or had occurred.

Notice THIS IS NOT the supposed “Stand your ground” law that everyone talks about. The law is not called “stand your ground” it’s actually called : 776.012 Use or threatened use of force in defense of person. And the words stand your ground are only three words i the entire statute.

The LAW IS CLEAR in that a person is believed to be in fear of great bodily harm or death when someone is trying to break into your home or does break into your home (mistake or not) you do not wait around and ask the person why they are doing what they are. You do not have time to sit down and chat. This has nothing to do with the Justifiable Use of Force in Defense of a Person Law that the news is citing, it has to do with the defense of your home.

Please research the information better before reporting and making people think the wrong things, about the wrong laws, and misleading the public. This is why so many people now say the term “Fake News” so much.

By Joshua Gant, Opslens contributer, and LEO!

“The concept that you can stop crime by increasing gun legislation is so off base that it is dangerous to the safety and security of each and every citizen of the United States.”

As I sit back and watch headline after headline tick across my screen, it’s disgusting to me to witness the assault being waged on our right to keep and bear arms. For the people who seem to have forgotten, those rights are guaranteed by a document that liberals like to side step from time to time called the Constitution of the United States.

I was a little surprised at the backlash of the mainstream media when the new administration talked of trying to write a new health care bill. You see I have a personal interest in this topic.

My wife has a pre-existing medical condition which would prohibit her from getting insurance from most health insurance companies. Fortunately, I have insurance through my employer and had it for my wife before she became gravely ill in 2015. After several weeks in ICU, a life flight to get emergency surgery, and continuing care after being discharged from the hospital our medical bills topped the 1.5 MILLION dollar mark! Well, of course, I am not wealthy by any measure and I would be bankrupt trying to pay all of that myself. Thankfully my insurance paid the vast majority of that bill, and we, with the help of friends, were able to pay the bills and stay out of bankruptcy.

Then I was hit when my son turned 18, having to find insurance for him also. The problem is we adopted him at 18 months of age, and until he turned 18 he had insurance provided by the state as an incentive for adoption. So when I called my benefits representative at my employer and asked how I go about putting him on my insurance plan at work I was shocked when she told me it would be more than $900 a month to add my son to my insurance plan at work. $900 a month for 1 person! I almost fell over in my office when she told me that. He is currently not insured and I am scared to death that he may get sick, or injured and require care.

As many of my readers know I work full time supervising a large police academy in North Florida. I have been in the law enforcement field since I was 13, getting hired at 18. That means I have been in law enforcement working for 37 years. I plan on retiring in about 6 years from now when I turned 62, but because of insurance for my wife, I may not be able to do that. I may have to work just to keep insurance for her and my son. You see I have full coverage for myself through the Veterans Administration.

So when I have been looking at the bickering in the capital about the health care issues our country is facing, I am one of those faces they like to talk about as an example of the cost of health care. When I was researching why health care cost so much, I saw the usual comments; high cost of doctors, the high cost of hospitals, the high cost of medicine. But nothing prepared me for the information I ran across on how much the CEO’s of the health care insurance companies make, and almost fell over from shock.

Now I don’t know about you, but I work for my pay, and like to think I earn what I get paid. But who in their right mind would say they are worth anywhere from $31,016 PER DAY or up to $254,328 PER DAY? I do not know what you could do that would earn that kind of money. The above graphic shows you the total compensation of Health Care Insurance companies CEO’s in 2014. All but one make more in one day than I make in a year!

So when people talk about universal health care or changing the current system, listen to them and then remind them that one of the reasons for our skyrocketing cost of health care coverage is that some people get paid in one-year more than most people make in their lifetimes! Who is worth that kind of money when it comes to offering insurance that people’s lives depend on! Something has to change, and I still do not have all the insurance I need because I can’t afford it!

“I would like to inform my readers that my entire funding is enough to buy a box of ammo now and then…and my reason is because I believe in the rights of people, as granted by God and the United States Constitution.”

I read a lot of news articles and opinion pieces and I get notices from various news sources on topics of interest to me. Through all of this, I have learned in the preceding few years that you cannot take for granted that the news source you are reading is a news source and not some biased opinion branch of some organization.

I recently got a note about a particular article from one of my followers who knows I like to read news on self-defense and firearms related topics. When I got this note, I saw the article from a website called The Trace. I always like to see where the people that are writing this information and passing it off as news are coming from, or at least where they get their “incentive” (code word for funding).

Like this:

If you do not live under a rock and pay any attention to the news and media at all, you will have heard the terms “gun control” or “common sense gun control” and also “assault weapon ban.” The issue is that if you ask different people to define these terms, you get different answers. No one can explain for you exactly what these terms mean, and there is a reason for that—a very simple reason. These terms describe something that does not exist. There is no such thing.

What? I know, I know– you have been bombarded with these terms for a couple of years now. You think you know what they mean, but you really don’t. They simply do not exist: there is no way to have, make, or legislate anything called “gun control.”

Gun control is a fallacy that those who fear or do not like firearms use to try to describe something they think will stop the shootings and killings that happen around the country. Well, I hate to burst their bubble, but there is not one single law—not one single “gun-free zone” or anything like that—that has stopped a single shooting. I would love to see the confession of a gun-wielding psychopath who said they were going to shoot up a location but decided not to because they saw a sign that read “gun-free zone”. There are people who think this happens; they are so sure of this that they want to create more gun-free zones. I guess it will take some incident they are involved in to make them realize you cannot legislate safety by taking away the ability of law-abiding citizens to protect themselves.

I just watched a video of the first shots fired by the Ft. Lauderdale airport shooter. It appears he casually walked through the baggage claim area, drew the gun from his waist, and started to fire. I will say that it looked like he was very determined to shoot the first victim, as he passed many others before he decided to act.

What kind of a person does this type of thing? What kind of person shoots and kills a fellow human being for no reason at all? It is morally reprehensible and against the very basic tenets of most religions, including mine. It is also against how I was raised. So, what can we do to stop — or at least reduce — the occurrence of this type of event?

Well, I hate to burst the bubble of all those who think that changing any laws will make a difference. These types of events have been going on throughout the entire history of this nation and many others. And as our nation grows, and more and more people crowd into the available land system, more of these types of shootings and morally reprehensible acts (The Facebook Torture Crew comes to mind) will happen. The very freedoms that we cherish so much are what make this type of act possible. You cannot have safety without true freedom. You cannot legislate morality into the laws of our land.